The Complete Uncle Silas Stories

by H. E. Bates

  It was early autumn, in the middle of harvest, when I heard that he was dying. If it had been winter, or even spring, I might have believed it. But in autumn, and at harvest, it was unthinkable, absurd. His late peas would be coming into pod: for seventy years he had reckoned on them, without fail, for a last blow-out, with a goose and a dish of apple-sauce made from his own first cookers, on Michaelmas Sunday. Who would pick the peas and gather the apples and lard the goose if he were to die? His potatoes would be dead ripe, the pears would be dropping into the golden orchard as mellow as honey, the elderberries would be drooping over the garden hedge in grape-dark bunches, ripe for wine. What would happen to them if Silas died? What could happen? No one else could dig those potatoes or garner those pears or work that wine as he did. The very words ‘Silas is dying’ seemed fantastic. Moreover I had heard them before. Hearing them once, I had hurried over to see him for the last time, only to find him up a ladder, pruning his apple trees with a jack-knife, all of a muck-sweat, with his jacket off, in the winter wind. ‘I heard you were dead,’ I said. He hawked and spat with a sort of gay ferocity. ‘Ever hear the tale of the old gal who heard I was dead and buried, and then seed me in The Swan? She never touched another drop.’

  When the news again came that he was dying I thought of his words. And I did not trouble to go over to see him. In imagination I saw him digging his potatoes in the hot September sun or mowing the half-acre of wheat he grew every other year at the end of the paddock, ‘just so as I shan’t forget how to swing a scythe’. The wheat kept him in bread, which he baked himself. He sent me a loaf sometimes, its crust as crisp as a wheat-husk and a dark earth-colour, and I often went over to help him band and carry the wheat. Even when I heard he was dying I expected every day to hear he had mown the wheat and was ready for me. I took as little notice of the news as that.

  But unexpectedly there came other news:

  ‘They say Silas doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time.’

  Not ‘Silas is ill’, or ‘Silas is dying’, or even ‘Silas is unconscious’, but ‘Silas doesn’t know what he’s doing’. The words were ominous, a contradiction of my Uncle Silas’s whole life, his principles, his character, his amazing cunning, his devilish vitality. They perturbed me, for they could mean so much. They might mean that my Uncle Silas had so changed that he now no longer knew beer from water or wheat from beans; that he had dug his potatoes under-ripe or carried his wheat wet or made his wine from green elderberries. If it meant these things then it also meant the end. For what separated my Uncle Silas from other men was exactly this. He knew what he was doing. How often had I heard him say with a cock of his bloodshot eye and the most devilish darkness: ‘I know what I’m doing, me boyo. I know what I’m doing.’

  The day after hearing the news I went over to see him. His little stone reed-thatched house, squatting close under the shelter of the spinney of pines, was visible from afar off. There was always a puff of wood-smoke rising from the chimney, very blue against the black pines, winter and summer alike, if my Uncle Silas were at home. It was lovely September weather, the air breathless, the sunshine very soft and the pale amber colour of new wheat straw, and I saw the smoke rising up as straight as the pines themselves as I walked up the lane to the house.

  It was a good sign. If the smoke were rising my Uncle Silas was at home; if he were at home it was a thousand to one, in summer-time, that he was in the paddock or the garden, or if not there, by his chair at the window, his mole-coloured head and his scarlet neckerchief just visible among the very old, sweet-leaved white and mauve geraniums.

  But that afternoon he was not in the paddock, where the wheat stood ripe and half-mown, and I could not see him in the garden, where the pears lay wasp-sucked and rotting in the yellowing grass. Walking up the garden path, with the rank marigolds and untidy chrysanthemum stalks swishing heavily against my legs, I frightened a jay off the pea-rows. I stopped at once. But my Uncle Silas did not appear. The jay squawked in the wood. A jay on the pea-rows, and no sign from my Uncle Silas! I did not even look for him at the window, among the geraniums.

  As I reached the door of the house I heard the clopping of the housekeeper’s untied shoes coming along the stone passages to meet me. Before she appeared, I stepped over the threshold and looked into the room. The house was the same as ever, with the same eternal smell of earth and tea, of wood-smoke and balm, of geranium-leaves and wine. There was even the faint earth-smell of my Uncle Silas himself. But his chair was empty.

  The housekeeper appeared a moment later, as scrawny and frigid as ever, and more straight-lipped, in the same black skirt and grey shirt-blouse and iron corsets that she seemed to have worn ever since my Uncle Silas had first engaged her, bringing with her as she had done for so many years, that smell of carbolic soap which had so often made him say, ‘I do believe you were suckled on soap.’ But that afternoon she looked tired, she seemed relieved to see me, and she broke out at once:

  ‘Oh! dear, he’ll wear me out.’

  There was a sort of melancholy affection for him in her voice, and I knew at once that there must be something wrong.

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked.

  But before she could reply his own cracked voice called suddenly:

  ‘I’m here, me boyo, in here.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ I called.

  ‘In the parlour,’ the housekeeper whispered.

  ‘All among the fol-di-dols,’ called my Uncle Silas. ‘Come in.’

  As I walked across the passage between the two rooms the housekeeper entreated me in another whisper, ‘The doctor says you mustn’t tire him.’

  The doctor! My Uncle Silas not to be tired! He who could have mown a forty-acre field and not be tired! It was all over, I thought, as I pushed open the parlour-door and went in and met the stale antimacassar odour of the closed room.

  And there, under the window, on an old black couch of American leather, with a green horse-rug over him and his sun-brown arms lying uselessly over the rug, lay my Uncle Silas. By his side was the night commode, and a little bamboo table with two wine-glasses and two bottles of lemon-coloured and blackish medicine on it.

  ‘Now don’t go and talk and tire yourself,’ said the housekeeper.

  ‘Go and wring yourself out, y’old wet sheet!’ he croaked.

  ‘What’s that? If you ain’t careful, I’ll pack me bag and leave you lying there. So I’ll tell you!’

  ‘Pack it! And good riddance.’

  ‘Ah, and I will!’ She flashed off to the door.

  It was the old game: she was always leaving and never leaving; my Uncle Silas was always dismissing her and always keeping her.

  ‘Look slippy and bring us a bottle o’ cowslip,’ he said. ‘And don’t talk so much.’

  But she was outside the door, without a word and not heeding him, before he had finished speaking. He lay back on the sofa, gloomily. ‘Won’t even let me wet me whistle,’ he said.

  He lay silent for a moment or two, his eyes watery, his chest heaving a little.’ I puff like an old frog,’ he said. I did not answer, and until he regained his breath and his calmness I could not look at him again, and I let my eyes wander over the room instead, over the fol-di-dols he hated so much, the accumulated knick-knacks of nearly a hundred years, the little milky glass vases, rose-painted cups, mahogany tea-caddies, ruby wine-glasses, all the dear pretty things that he despised and never used. To find him there among them was a tragedy itself. He loved living things; and the only living things in that room were ourselves and the afternoon sunlight yellowing the closed window.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said at last. His voice so weary that I hardly recognised it. ‘Can you find a seat? All the damn chairs in this room are bum-slippy!’

  I sat down on one of the black American leather chairs that matched his couch.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I ain’t worth a hatful o’ crabs.’

  I could har
dly bear the words. To hear that he didn’t know what he was doing, to see a jay on his pea-rows, to find that he mustn’t drink or talk or tire himself and now to hear him say, ‘I ain’t worth a hatful o’ crabs.’ My heart sank. It seemed to mean that his spirit was already dead. And no sooner had I thought it than he half-cocked his eye at me with a faint flicker of the old cunning.

  ‘See that jay on the pea-rows?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah. I’ll jay him.’

  And then, with a sudden satanic flash of his bloodshot eye that surprised and delighted me, he whispered:

  ‘Mouthful o’ wine?’

  I sat astonished. ‘I thought they wouldn’t let you drink?’ I said.

  He winked. ‘In the medicine bottles,’ he said. ‘Elderberry in the dark and cowslip in the light. Pour out. Mouthful o’ cowslip for me.’

  Smiling, I poured out the wine and he lay smiling back at me with all his old subtlety and wickedness. As I gave him the glass he whispered: ‘I fill ’em o’ nights when she’s a-bed.’

  We drank in silence.

  ‘What’s the doctor say?’ I asked.

  ‘Says another drop o’ wine will kill me.’

  He finished his wine and wiped out the glass on the horse-blanket before putting it back on the table. The wine twinkled in his eyes and had already flushed away the dead yellow colour of his skin. And suddenly he shot up in bed, craning his tough thick neck to look out of the window:

  ‘That jay again! God damn it, go and get my gun.’

  I knew he meant it and I rose at once and went to the door. But he had raised his voice, and the housekeeper had heard him. She was in the room almost before I had moved, with the old despairing cry:

  ‘Oh! he’ll wear me out!’

  She seized him sternly, forcing him back on the pillows while he shouted at her:

  ‘You interferin’ old tit! I’ll shoot that jay if I have to shoot you first!’

  ‘He don’t know what he’s saying or doin’,’ she said to me. And then to him, as she straightened his blankets inexorably:

  ‘You’ll take your medicine now, jay or no jay, and then get some sleep.’

  As she took up the dark medicine bottle and poured out his measure into the wine-glass he kept lolling out his tongue, sick-fashion, and rolling his eyes and complaining, ‘It’s like drinking harness oil and vinegar, oh! it’s like drinking harness oil and vinegar. Ach!’

  ‘Drink it!’ She forced the glass into his hands and he crooked his elbow on the pillow, lolling his tongue in and out.

  She turned away to draw down the blinds. No sooner was her back turned than he lifted his glass and gave me a swift marvellous look of the wickedest triumph, licking his thick red lips and half-closing his bloodshot eye. The glass was empty and he was lying back on the pillows, smacking his mouth sourly, before she turned her head again.

  ‘I’ll come and see you,’ I said, with my hand on the door-latch.

  ‘Ah, do. I s’ll have the taters out next week and the wheat down. Come and give us a hand.’ The faint shadow of that wicked and triumphant smile flickered across his face. ‘So long, me boyo.’

  Outside, in the garden, I asked the housekeeper what was the matter with him.

  ‘It’s senile decay,’ she said. ‘He’s losing the use of his legs and half the time he don’t know what he’s doing. It’s just the medicine that keeps him going.’ I had no doubt it was.

  But one morning, a week later, I heard that he was dying; and in the afternoon I went over to the house. A gentle rain had been falling all morning, a quiet whispering September rain, and the air, very still and sultry, was saturated with the fragrance of wet pines. Crossing the paddock, I noticed that the wheat had been mown and half-banded and that the elderberries had gone from the garden-hedge. In the garden itself there was an intense rain-heavy stillness, unbroken except for the fretful twitter of swallows gathering on the house thatch. Looking across the rank thicket of dahlias and sunflowers beyond the apple trees I caught a glimpse of a dead blue jay strung on a hazel-stick among the pea-rows, its bright feathers dimmed with rain.

  The housekeeper came to meet me at the door, her finger uplifted and her lips pursed tight to silence me.

  ‘How is it with him?’ I whispered.

  ‘Bad,’ she said. ‘Very bad. He won’t see to-morrow.’

  ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘He won’t know you. He’s very strange.’

  Yes, he was very strange. He had begun to turn day into night, she told me: he would doze all day and then, in the dead of night, while she was asleep, he would wake and ferret in the cellar or mow his wheat and dig his potatoes and gather his elderberries for wine. She had suspected nothing until, awakened early one morning by a gun-shot, she had hurried into the garden to find him stringing up a dead jay in his pea-rows. It seemed that sometimes, too, he would drink his medicine in one swig, by the bottleful. He was so far gone as that.

  When she had finished speaking I went into the house to look at him: he lay there, as before, on the leather couch, among the fol-di-dols, the green horse-rug over him and his brown hands lying listlessly outside it. He seemed to be asleep: yet there was something half-alert about the expression of his closed eyes, as though he were listening to me or perhaps to the rain. I stood for a moment watching him. And suddenly his eyes half-opened and a gaze that had in it some of the old strength and wickedness rested on me darkly. In a moment his lips moved too.

  ‘What’s the weather?’ he said.

  ‘It rains,’ I said.

  ‘Let it,’ he whispered.

  It was a flash of the old spirit. In a moment it was gone and his lips closed without another sound, and his eyelids lowered with a sharp flicker that was like a last wink at me.

  I never heard him speak again. When we went in to him again, in the evening, he had turned day into night for the last time. The rain had ceased. The sun had broken through and was shining on the empty medicine bottles and his dead hands.

  The Return

  A little more than a year after my Uncle Silas died and was laid under the sycamores in the churchyard overlooking the river, I walked through the fields one afternoon to look for the last time at the little house by the pine spinney where he had lived for seventy years. It was soft autumn weather; the sunlight as mellow and still as Silas’s cowslip wine.

  As I went up the lane to the house I looked for the old sign of things: smoke rising from the chimney; the old summer bird-scares, age-green hats on sticks and inside-out umbrellas and twirling shuttlecocks; scarecrows made up of odd legs of Silas’s pants and bell-bottomed trousers and the housekeeper’s ancient hat and chemises; the ladder in the late apple trees; the bonfire filling the garden and the spinney and the fields with smoke that hung in sweet-smelling clouds under the pines and the golden cherry leaves. I listened for the cluck of Silas’s hens and the grunting and rooting of the solitary sow he had always kept in the black sty under the elderberries at the garden end.

  But it was very quiet, oddly silent everywhere. I could hear nothing. And then, coming to the garden gate, I saw that the gate and the fence, rain-green and patterned with prints of orange fungus for as long as I could remember, had been neatly repaired and painted white. The effect was curiously sepulchral. But it did not trouble me. It was only when I saw, beyond the fence, the stump of a sawn-down apple tree, and then another, and then another of a cherry tree, and beyond that a wide empty space where the gooseberry trees had been, and beyond that another white fence in place of the old wild elderberry hedge, that I began to grow perturbed and finally angry. And for some minutes I stood there on the grass outside, helpless, staring at the white fences, the empty garden, the sawn-off tree-trunks, the newly white-painted windows until suddenly I could bear it no longer. It was the trees which finished me: lovely summer apple trees and the black-heart cherry trees and the yellow plums. Sawn down! Scrapped! God Almighty!

  I opened the gate and slammed it shut again and wal
ked up the path to the front door. It was shut—and painted white! The saintly effect of that repeated whiteness was too much. I hammered the door with my stick. I was pretty well worked up, ready for anything, with enough scorching irony ready on my lips to have burnt the paint off that door.

  And then, waiting there, furious, I saw something else. The old sweet pink-and-white double roses that had grown on either side of the door for countless years had been sawn down too. The anger went out of me at once. I went listless. And there I stood; feeling pretty idiotic and as dumb as a brick, the irony evaporated with the anger, my whole spirit flat.

  Then the door opened. And instantly my anger rose up again; but not bitterly. It was a sweet, nice anger—precise, juicy. My mouth was watering as though after a sour-sweet apple.

  A young woman had opened the door. She too was dressed in white. She seemed to me like a paling out of the white fence; straight up and straight down, straight and white whichever way I looked at her. Her face was white, too: a pasty, town white. She was knitting. She carried the white wool and the white bone needles in her hands. She looked newly married. And, seeing me standing there, angry-faced, with the stick, she looked frightened.